BY MULUGETA GUDETA
Amharic is not only the national language of Ethiopia. It is also the major literary language of the country, a medium through Which Ethiopian writers expressed themselves for centuries. According to Wikipedia, “The language serves as the official working language of the Ethiopian federal government, and is also the official or working language of several of Ethiopia’s federal regions.
With 31,800,000 mother-tongue speakers as of 2018, plus another 25,100,000 second language speakers, Amharic is the second most commonly-spoken mother-tongue of Ethiopia after Oromiffa, but the most widely spoken in terms of total speakers. It is also the second-most commonly spoken Semitic language in the world after Arabic.”
Encyclopedia Britannica outlines the development of Amharic literature in the following words, “The first official chronicles wholly in Amharic were those of Tewodros II (1855–68). A translation of John Bunyan’s Pilgrim’s Progress made in 1892 pointed the way to a new popular form-the allegorical novel, often partly in verse, with a religious bias, of which the first was Libb wellad tarik (1908; “Imaginative Story”) by Afeworq Gabre-Eyesus. During the regency of Ras Tafari (1916–20; afterward Emperor Haile Selassie I), Hiruy Walde Selassie (d. 1938) became the leading Amharic writer, especially notable for allegorical compositions such as Wedaje lebbe (“My Heart as My Friend”).”
While the other Ethiopian languages have not developed their own written literatures, or produced works of artistic merit, Amharic boasts of a long history of oral and written literature that traces its origins from the Ge’ez, an ancient church language that has now nearly disappeared. Amharic literature has a glorious artistic and literary past as it was the language of the palace and the aristocracy that favored it at the expense of the other languages of the country that were spoken by the majority of the people of Ethiopia.
History and politics has also promoted Amharic to the top of the literary development of the country over the last few centuries. Amharic thus enjoyed almost near monopoly as a lingua franca and a medium of literary expression. It was the language of schools and the courts and administration for over two hundred years and these factors were crucial for its advancement while the other languages of the nationalities languished in obscurity as they were only spoken and no written record of their evolution and development was available until very recently.
Ethiopia’s classical novels, poems or plays such as Fikir Eske Mekaber (Love unto Death) by the late Haddis Alemayehu, were produced by Amharic-speaking writers or by non-Amharic speaking writers like Solomon Deressa, author of many poems, or the writer with Amahra-Oromo descent like Tsegaye G/Medhin, largely regarded as Ethiopia’s major playwright and poet laureate. However, with a handful of notable writers who emerged in the 20th century, Ethiopian literature has little to boast of as a national language that was kept within its national boundary and did not contribute much to the development of African literature.
By contrast, Gikuyu in Kenya has grown beyond its national or ethnic boundaries and even made its presence felt in world literature as writers who used it to express themselves like Ngugi Wa Tiongo who wrote his seminal novel “Wizard of the Crow” first in Gikuyu and then translated it into English and achieved global distinction. Colonialism might have inspired other African writers to write in European languages but this cannot be used as the main reason or excuse for the retardation of Amharic writers in Amharic, because Amharic has not yet produced works worthy of translation into other languages.
Consequently most Ethiopian writers could not write in English or translate their works into that language. The main reason for this is not lack of education but lack of talent that could be big enough to attract international attention by producing works that reflect and express the human condition In general. One can write in Chinese, Urdu or Russian but as long as they deal with the human condition in a way that sheds light on their experiences or history, they are likely to go out of their national confinements and join the writers from other linguistic backgrounds and histories. Amharic has not yet produced works of literature that reflect collective experience of humanity wherever it might be found.
Amharic literature is confined in time in the sense that in the last one hundred years or so a handful of works by older writers have captured the attention of reads here at home. It is as if the woks of Haddis, Tsegaye and others had set the standards s high that nobody is likely to reach them let alone surpass them. It is as if Amharic literature has reached its limits but in actual facts it has not even used half of its potentials for producing literary works with global reach. Ethiopian writers have before them a rich national history, experience and the necessary materials for producing classical works, but they have not developed their skills in a way that could help them produce international literary works.
Lack of education and talent are not however the only constraining factors that have so far prevented Ethiopian writers in Amharic or in other languages as well, to produce works worthy of global reach or global attention. Ethiopian recent history is filled with dramatic moments and events but its writers have not been able to exploit the rich materials before them to produce something worthy of posterity.
The media and so-called art connoisseurs are still dealing with old writers’ names and old works of fiction and non-fiction while they continue to ignore or they don’t even know that a notable writer The Thirteenth Sun is the only novel written in English by Ethiopian author the late Daniachew Worku.
Ethiopian readers and “critics” however hammer on “Adefres”, the author’s work in Amharic as an unsurpassed work of literature. They could for instance translate The Thirteenth Sun and make available to the Amharic reading public so that it could see and evaluate is worth instead of hammering on his single Amharic novel for many decades to the point of making the readers and audiences numb with boredom.
The media’s focus on handful writers as the only novelists worthy of the mantra had a frustrating effect on the new and rising young writers to come up with something new and think out of the box. They are considered by the media as “junior or novice” writers who never grow up to reach the status the older peers enjoyed or even surpass them.
Literary criticism is either absent or underdeveloped in Ethiopia. Every guy who has passed through the publishing business or taken courses in Amharic literature at college often parade as “literary critic” and speak of writers and their works in public with the courage worthy of real art critics. What they express however are often their ill-digested opinions and not critical ideas that could help develop the writers. Literary criticism should be given as an independent course at college levels so that potentials critics could understand what it means to be a literary critic and distinguish the difference between opinion and objective evaluation of literary works.
The other constraint that is impeding Amharic literature from going forward to produce works worthy of local or international attention is the limits on freedom of expression. In the past, a number of writers have been punished by government for expressing their ideas in books. They have gone through exile (like Abe Gubegna) or have been assassinated (like Bealu Girma) and these negative experiences are still haunting Ethiopian writers to this day and discouraging them to push the boundaries of creativity to come up with notable works.
As a result of all this, Amharic literature is stuck in space and time looking backward to the old works that have outlived their purpose and unable to look at the present with opened eyes. Haddis Alemayehu and the other veteran writers wrote about feudalism and its social effects. Others wrote about the bureaucracy and corruption from their personal perspectives. Much water has flowed under the bridge since those authors dealt with the challenges of their times. We are now facing new challenges and new issues that could not be covered even if hone hundred writers decided to write about them. Sadly enough, no Ethiopian writer worthy of their mantle have so far gathered enough courage to live to their real callings.
As a result of this, Amharic literature is stagnating in its old glories. Perhaps it might be waiting until more courageous and abler writers could emerge using the other languages of Ethiopia and enrich the national literature by so doing. Speakers of other Ethiopian languages too need to rise to the occasion and express themselves in their own language to give artistic expression to their specific experiences so that together with the other writers of other languages, they could perhaps take the national literature out of its current doldrums.
THE ETHIOPIAN HERALD WEDNESDAY 13 JULY 2022
